Democrat, Illinois - The ElectroLounge

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Bloggs and Mrs. Blizzard in one of my old short stories, or the office drones Max Blumf and
Susan Block, who appeared together one day in the comic strip Dilbert (Feb. 1, 1998).
The best one-word gloss for B is “unrefined,” a quality that draws reactions ranging
from genial amusement to outright disgust. B is dismissive. A little nowhere town in
American slang is East Buttfuck or East Bumblefuck. The British intensifier bloody and its B
euphemisms are mostly scornful: bloody awful, blooming idiot, blasted fool. We spit out our
scorn along with B’s little air-puff: bitch, bastard, bullshit.
Two Bubbles
Another notable characteristic of B is doubleness. As you’ve probably noticed, an
awful lot of made-up B names have two B elements in a row, from Belgian Behemoth to
Bombay Boola. Alliterative names are found with all letters—think of Tiny Tim and Peter
Piper—but B alliterations are much more common than any others. They’re funny. Pick up
any comic novel and you’ll probably find a double-barrelled B name in it. For example, the
Wodehouse novel I mentioned earlier has two: detective Buxton Black and jealous boyfriend
Bricky Bostock. (Ben Bolt from the old poem gets mentioned too.) Other Wodehouse stories
feature Beefy Bingham and the boxer Battling Billson. Double-barrelled B’s are as common as
air: Big Ben, Big Bertha, Big Brother, Big Bird, the Big Bang, Big Business, big bucks, the big
boys, the big bad wolf. And that’s just with bigs.
There are plenty more without bigs: the Baby Boom, boomerang babies, the Bronx
Bombers, the Butcher of Baghdad, Blackbeard, Bluebeard, Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bob, the Bible
Belt, Black Beauty, Beau Brummell, the Brady Bunch, the Beanie Babies, the pudding called
brown betty, the British army musket Brown Bess, Melville’s Billy Budd, the song characters
Billy boy and Bill Bailey, Clint Eastwood’s Bronco Billy, and the African-American cowboymovie
star Herb Jefferies, the Bronze Buckaroo.
I came across half a dozen double-barrelled B’s the week I was writing this section.
The newish comic strip Baldo is about a dreamy Mexican-American teenager named Baldo
Bermudez. When his family dresses up as a Mexican-style band, his father calls them the
Balladeering Bermudezes, although Baldo himself prefers the name the B Boys and Girls (Mar.
16 and 19, 2001). In the Mar. 18 men’s fashion supplement of The New York Times, which
took bachelors as its theme, the phrase “Broadway Brummells” appears on p. 78, and
“bachelor boudoir” on p. 90—along with a 1970 photo of Hugh Hefner “cuddled on a fur
blanket with his then-paramour and Playmate, Barbi Benton,” aboard their private plane, the
Big Bunny!
With all this doubleness I think we’re back to unconscious echoes of bottom-cheeks.
Who was that romantic Southern gentleman? Rhett Butt-ler? Here’s the name that clinched
it for me: in John Knowles’s boarding-school novel A Separate Peace (1959, chap. 7), the
narrator recalled his athletic-looking classmate Brinker Hadley: “Brinker’s salient
characteristic” was “his healthy rump . . . those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated
but definite and substantial buttocks.” The context is matter-of-fact rather than erotic: a B
character is equated with a healthy rump. It’s a B thought.
Other writers have B thoughts too. In Walden’s chapter “Spring,” Thoreau mused
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